Topic
A technique for directing AI requests among multiple language models based on cost, task complexity, or performance, often to cut spend or boost speed.
One developer's audit of Claude Code found 97 of 200 agent steps could run on a local model, against 4 of 100 whole requests. That makes the agent step the unit to route on, on evidence from one person's sessions and one RTX 4070.
Reality
The Copilot research preview picks a single, cascade, or critique workflow per request, and you pay standard Copilot rates for every token in every leg. So the router has to save more expensive inference than the extra calls cost.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Fabian Hedin, Lovable's CTO, said two-thirds of the Fortune 500 use the tool because staff found it themselves, and put current revenue at $600m. The permissions work starts after the apps are running.
Reality
Vonder costs $299, has no cameras and ships in November. Viture's cofounder says the built-in assistant messaged him unprompted about how he was treating his 10-year-old at tennis tournaments.
Reality
LiteLLM works as a drop-in OpenAI replacement for teams running their own clusters, while managed gateways suit teams renting inference. OpenRouter's reported $113M round at a $1.3B valuation funds the rented side.
Reality
OmnisBench's author rebuilt his split from date-stamped LiveCodeBench problems. The cheap tier fell from 90% to 60%, and a 4,096-token cap had been marking the frontier model absent.
Reality
A dev.to price walkthrough shows two models swapping places by 17% and 42% on the same list prices. For that pair, the crossover sits at ten input tokens per output token.
Reality